Exhibition
Pièces distinguées

To mark the 20^th anniversary of the CN D in Pantin, the exhibition Pièces distinguées offers a paradoxical unveiling of the 250 or so archives and private collections - of artists, critics and researchers, photographers and video-makers, ballet lovers and dance professionals and structures - assembled by the CN D media library since its creation. Unveiling, because it is for themselves that the documents are exhibited here, as “archive pieces” bearing witness to archiving and deposit procedures, and to processing methods. Paradoxical, because the sheer size of the archives we have assembled has led us to make a radical choice: to showcase each collection - a complex repository built up around a single personality or structure - we have chosen a single document (textual, iconographic or audiovisual, handwritten or printed, confidential or published, original or reproduced), without aiming to be representative or hierarchical, but according to a thousand criteria combined to reveal the variety and interest of these archives, and to pay tribute to those who have entrusted them to us. 

What landscape - for this is our ambition - do these distinguished pieces presented together compose? That of a certain past of dance and its protagonists, of what has survived or what may be re-emerging today, through the medium and filter of a documentary policy. 
However, taken out of context and dissociated from their original purpose or raison d'être, these documents - which historian Krzysztof Pomian has described as “imprint carriers” - also open up a number of imaginary worlds, conjuring up a thousand singular memories and perhaps just as many dreams of history, to use the expression of historian Philippe Artières. 

In the course of the exhibition, you'll be able to link these traces to your own idea of the field or your own history with dance, to recognize an approach, a network or a place, or, conversely, to be surprised by a piece of writing, to let yourself be seized by unsuspected images, to open up your perspective on the art of choreography and its protagonists.